Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of by Sara Warner

Acts of Gaiety explores the mirthful modes of political functionality by means of LGBT artists, activists, and collectives that experience encouraged and sustained lethal critical struggles for progressive swap. The booklet explores antics comparable to camp, kitsch, drag, guerrilla theater, zap activities, rallies, manifestos, pageants, and parades along extra wide-spread different types of "legitimate theater." opposed to queer theory's long-suffering romance with mourning and melancholia and a countrywide schedule that urges homosexuals to give up excitement in the event that they are looking to be taken heavily via mainstream society, Acts of Gaiety seeks to reanimate notions of "gaiety" as a political price for LGBT activism.

The e-book mines the information of lesbian-feminist activism of the 1960s-70s, highlighting the outrageous gaiety that lay on the heart of the social and theatrical performances of the period and uncovering unique records lengthy regarded as misplaced. Juxtaposing ancient figures corresponding to Valerie Solanas and Jill Johnston with more moderen performers and activists (including Hothead Paisan, complain & Animal, and the 5 Lesbian Brothers), Warner indicates how reclaiming this principally discarded and disavowed previous elucidates probabilities for being and belonging. Acts of Gaiety explores the at the same time informing histories of gayness as politics and as joie de vivre, in addition to the centrality of liveliness to queer functionality and protest.

During this thought-provoking interdisciplinary paintings, Shaun Marmon describes how eunuchs, as a class of people that embodied ambiguity, either outlined and mediated serious thresholds of ethical and actual area within the family, within the palace and within the tomb of pre-modern Islamic society. The author's vital concentration is at the sacred society of eunuchs who guarded the tomb of the Prophet Muhammad in Medina for over six centuries and whose final representatives nonetheless practice lots of their time venerated rituals to this present day.

During this publication, Carrie L. Buist and Emily Lenning give some thought to the origins of Queer Criminology, survey the foundational learn and scholarship during this rising box, and supply feedback for the longer term. overlaying subject matters similar to the criminalization of queerness; the policing of Queer groups; Queer reviews within the court docket; and the correctional keep watch over of Queer humans, Queer Criminology synthesizes the paintings of criminologists, reporters, criminal students, non-governmental enterprises, and others to light up the historic and modern context of the Queer event.

Facing ethical, political and sexual tensions, this quantity presents a discussion board for male/female discussion about the background, dissemination and effects of pornographic representaion in movie and literature, aiming to problem validated perspectives and encourage extra exploration and debate.

This eye-opening research offers a nuanced, provocative account of ways German infantrymen within the nice conflict skilled and enacted masculinity. Drawing on an array of correct narratives and media, it explores the ways in which either heterosexual and gay squaddies expressed emotion, understood romantic beliefs, and approached intimacy and sexuality.

Extra info for Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure

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Surrounded by several hundred demonstrators who assailed them with coins, beer cans, and bricks from a nearby construction yard, the officers retreated and barricaded themselves inside the bar. Uprooting a parking meter, some of the demonstrators smashed through the plate glass window. As protesters seized the police, the officers drew their guns and threatened to shoot. Someone set the bar on fire, and within seconds the room was engulfed in flames. Reinforcements arrived and tried to reestablish order.

Not all feminists, however, took an earnest approach to women’s history or to trauma. When Miguel left the Open Theater, she started a collective with her two (heterosexual) sisters, Gloria Miguel and Lisa Mayo. Drawing on their cultural heritage as members of the Kuna and Rappahannock nations, they called their troupe Spiderwoman Theater. Spiderwoman refers to the goddess of weaving, and the practice of story weaving is the foundation of the collective’s feminist aesthetic. Their first performance was a comedy titled Women in Violence (1975), and it addressed violence against women and among women, as well as self-­inflected abuse.

Lesbian feminists began producing adult videos, unionizing strip clubs like the Lusty Lady in San Francisco, and reclaiming the art of burlesque. The desire to counter the 24 Acts of Gaiety moralizing practices of antipornography activists prompted women in the 1980s to renew their commitment to gaiety. The WOW Café, an off-­off-­Broadway performance space and social club, took root in New York’s East Village in the midst of the sex wars and became a laboratory for the exploration of lesbian feminist gaiety.